Housing Affordability: A Syllogism

Wooded Area, Point Loma, California
In Point Loma, the incomes of many households are falling behind the rising price of rental and for-sale homes. In some cases, households are priced out of neighborhoods in which their families have lived for generations. We call this a crisis in housing affordability.

Builders and real estate investors are saying the solution to this crisis is to build more housing but prices of newly developed housing are less affordable? Housing affordability isn’t the builders’ or bankers’ concern; it’s the community’s problem.

For the real estate industry, the solution to housing affordability is for households that can’t afford increasing rents and home prices to move elsewhere. The problem with the building industry’s solution is that a community like Point Loma is its population, not its buildings. So, when households are priced out of Point Loma, the unique expression of community moves away and is replaced by a population who lack a background of common relation to the history, traditional culture and values of this unique place. For Point Loma, a community of strangers is the crisis we are calling, “housing affordability”.

In Point Loma, the affordability crisis is exacerbated by real estate investors, who are now taking advantage of a decades-old zoning ordinance to acquire and build affordable multifamily apartments and converting them to expensive condominiums. Stability in housing cost certainly requires attention, a policy to prevent conversions of multifamily apartments to condominium ownership would preserve existing apartments and, with other measures help maintain affordability in Point Loma.